ROME: Around 180 people are presumed to have died in the first major migrant boat disaster of 2017 in the Mediterranean, officials said on Tuesday after interviewing a handful of survivors.
The International Organization of Migration (IOM) and UN refugee agency (UNHCR) increased the estimate after interviewing the five survivors of the shipwreck who arrived in Trapani, Sicily, on Monday aboard the Norwegian rescue ship Siem Pilot.
IOM spokesman Flavio Di Giacomo said the survivors included four men and one woman from Ethiopia and Eritrea. Humanitarian workers from the IOM and the UNHCR recounted harrowing details of the capsize that occurred in waters off Libya after talking to the rescued passengerss.
They reported having set off from Libya aboard a wooden boat that started taking on water and sank after the engine broke. They said that their two-tier boat had left on Friday with more than 180 people packed on board, all of them originally from East Africa.
After five hours at sea, the engine cut out and the boat started to take on water. As it slowly sank, more and more of the people on board were submerged under water.
The survivors, suffering from shock and exhaustion, have been hospitalized.
One of the survivors described his desperate effort to find his wife, who had taken a spot in the center of the ship along with around 70 other women. A number of children were also on board and none of them survived.
After hours in the water, the five survivors were rescued 30 nautical miles from the Libyan coast by a French boat operating as part of the European borders agency Frontex’s Operation Triton before being transferred to another Frontex ship, the Siem Pilot.
Siem Pilot, provided by the Norwegian coast guard, arrived in Trapani on Monday evening with the five survivors, four recovered corpses and 34 people rescued from another stricken migrant boat.
The latest deaths and rescues follow a record year for the number of migrants trying to reach Europe on the western Mediterranean route from north Africa to Italy.
Some 181,000 people were registered at Italian ports in 2016 while the UNHCR recorded more than 5,000 deaths and presumed deaths on all migrant routes across the Mediterranean.
Despite the mid-winter weather making crossings particularly perilous, the start of 2017 has brought no sign of departures slowing with some 2,300 migrants already registered in Italy since Jan. 1. A total of 226 people have died, according to a UN count covering the entire Mediterranean.
The International Organization of Migration (IOM) and UN refugee agency (UNHCR) increased the estimate after interviewing the five survivors of the shipwreck who arrived in Trapani, Sicily, on Monday aboard the Norwegian rescue ship Siem Pilot.
IOM spokesman Flavio Di Giacomo said the survivors included four men and one woman from Ethiopia and Eritrea. Humanitarian workers from the IOM and the UNHCR recounted harrowing details of the capsize that occurred in waters off Libya after talking to the rescued passengerss.
They reported having set off from Libya aboard a wooden boat that started taking on water and sank after the engine broke. They said that their two-tier boat had left on Friday with more than 180 people packed on board, all of them originally from East Africa.
After five hours at sea, the engine cut out and the boat started to take on water. As it slowly sank, more and more of the people on board were submerged under water.
The survivors, suffering from shock and exhaustion, have been hospitalized.
One of the survivors described his desperate effort to find his wife, who had taken a spot in the center of the ship along with around 70 other women. A number of children were also on board and none of them survived.
After hours in the water, the five survivors were rescued 30 nautical miles from the Libyan coast by a French boat operating as part of the European borders agency Frontex’s Operation Triton before being transferred to another Frontex ship, the Siem Pilot.
Siem Pilot, provided by the Norwegian coast guard, arrived in Trapani on Monday evening with the five survivors, four recovered corpses and 34 people rescued from another stricken migrant boat.
The latest deaths and rescues follow a record year for the number of migrants trying to reach Europe on the western Mediterranean route from north Africa to Italy.
Some 181,000 people were registered at Italian ports in 2016 while the UNHCR recorded more than 5,000 deaths and presumed deaths on all migrant routes across the Mediterranean.
Despite the mid-winter weather making crossings particularly perilous, the start of 2017 has brought no sign of departures slowing with some 2,300 migrants already registered in Italy since Jan. 1. A total of 226 people have died, according to a UN count covering the entire Mediterranean.
